Whiskey and Water (40 page)

He led them to an empty room, one where
the furniture was covered in dustcloths and the art on the walls draped against
light. He lit the gas lamps with a wave of his hand and gestured to Matthew to
shut the door. "We won't be disturbed here."

Geoff had a hand on Lily's arm, not so
much directing her as warming that small patch of her skin against the inner chill
that huddled her shoulders and bent her head. She straightened as the door
clicked shut, small breasts swelling over the top of her corset as she breathed
deep. She shoved her mask up savagely, disarraying her hair, revealing
violently kohled eyes.

"He said I had power." She
glared at pinned Kit. "Show me how to use it. Christian wanted me, and Fionnghuala
brought me to Hell, and" —she shook her head—"it's tangled up
somehow. It's got to be. I didn't pick it, but I'm
in
this."

Kit smiled. "I suspect I've walked in
on the third act of your drama," he said. "But as one who's lain down
for a devil myself, I can say that there are worse things."

The words struck her like a pan of ice
water in the face. She blinked, swallowed, and it took a moment for her to get
her tongue reorganized around whatever she had been about to say.

"I beg your pardon?" When all
else failed, her grandmother Mary would have said, good manners never deserted
one.

"Christian," he said.
"That's what you were brought here to see, weren't you?"

Lily nodded, dry-mouthed, wishing suddenly
she hadn't been so quick to dispense with her mask. Beside her, Geoff stripped
his off, letting it dangle from the strings. It had pinched the bridge of his
nose red. "He's been teaching me magic."

"Witchcraft," Kit said, kindly.
"I've used it myself."

"Christian?"
Matthew said the name too fast, stumbling
over it, and Lily stared at him. "What does your Christian look
like?"

"Red hair," Lily said. "A
few freckles. Good-looking. He was in my coven — "

"Jane's apprentice," Matthew
said.

And Kit covered his face with his hands
and laughed. "Bloody hell," he said, and looked at them both. "He's
a devil, Matthew. The youngest. Lily was right, and it is all
interlinked."

Matthew found no words. Geoff, however,
convinced that whatever he was saying was as stupid as everything else he'd
said since Sunday night, managed to add, "Someone named Fionnghuala sent
her here. She came with a message for Prince Ian, as well, and invitations for
both of them."

"Which still doesn't explain why
you
walked into Hell," Matthew interjected, a muscle along the side of
his jaw jumping in unconscious counterpoint. "Just after being fortunate
enough to get clear of Faerie — "

His anger was a shield for fear, though,
and Geoff took a little pity on him when he realized Matthew's hands weren't
shaking with wrath. Geoff folded his arms. "Lily needed me. And
you
seem
to come and go as you please."

Matthew kept his tone even, but didn't
lessen the mockery. "Lily
needed
you? And what would you do to
defend her, given you want nothing to do with magic? Or did you tag along when
you learned Jewels would attend?"

Lily bit her lip. She took a breath, and
said, instead, "And what's
your
interest in how Geoff spends his
time?"

It brought Matthew up short. Shorter than
she had intended, because he paused and winced, cocking his head. There was a
silence, as if he considered her question and thought it through, before answering
carefully.

"Geoffrey has power," he said in
a calm, professorial voice. "So do you; so do I." He glanced at the poet,
who had leaned against the wall and folded his arms, waiting with every
evidence of patience. Marlowe straightened and tipped an imaginary hat as
Matthew named him. "So does Master Marlowe. The price of Geoff's power is
that he will be used for it, controlled and directed, manipulated and seduced,
raped
if that's what it takes. And if he doesn't want it, his choice is to get
the hell out, and tend his own garden. Is that clear enough for you?"

"And if he chooses not to?"

Kit stepped forward, reinserting himself
into the conversation. He took Lily's hand in his own and turned it over so the
backs of his fingers were exposed. An iron ring on one; on the others, only
scars. She yanked her hand back.

"Before long," Marlowe said,
"like you, like me, like Matthew here — he won't be offered a
choice." As if on his words, she felt the silence, the loneliness come
crashing back. The emptiness of Hell.
Hell is not other people. It'd no one
else at all.

It stilled her.

And while she was still, Marlowe reached
out left-handed, and whipped the pall from a standing mirror with a player's
gesture, swirling heavy dust through the gaslight. He let the shroud fall to
the floor, and beckoned. "Your hands, please?"

Lily stepped forward obediently. This
time, Geoffrey hesitated. "Where are you sending us?" "Boston?"
Kit ventured.

"Will that get me closer to whoever
killed Althea?"

"Althea?" Lily said.
"Althea
Benning?
Dead?"

Matthew sighed, and Geoffrey nodded and
ducked his head. Lily stood, mouth open, until Matthew forestalled her with an
upraised hand and said, "I could warn you again — "

"Matthew," Geoffrey said,
"she was my friend."

A simple declaration, calm and serious.
Matthew felt the boy's sincerity like pain, a thumb pressed into the hollow of
his throat. He drew breath to respond, and Geoff cut him off, his tone gone dry
with self-mockery.

"I understand that I'm risking my
body, my sanity, and my immortal soul. And I don't care. You're the only person
I know who has a chance of finding out who — " Geoff stopped, gagged by a
visceral memory of the smell of blood and spilled bowels, his voice skying as
fragile composure cracked.

He waved off Matthew's concerned gesture
with a brusque right hand and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm—I'm
staying," he said, when he got a breath. "And what about you? You're
so damned scared of this all you can do is yell — "

"It was my job to keep her
safe," Matthew said, and shrugged. "Scared doesn't enter into
it."

Matthew rubbed his eyes, profoundly tired.
"I can't promise to protect you. If you get involved in this, it will
probably get you killed. And we might very well get killed in our own private
little war on Sunday, so now's not the best time for signing up
apprentices."

He looked at Marlowe, and Marlowe pursed
his lips. "Well," he said. "On the other hand, if we don't get
killed on Sunday, we're going to need apprentices."

"Whatever," Lily said.
"Look, I already fucked the Devil. Do you think I'm scared of a little
war?"

The shifting cold in Donah's ring was
unsettling. The detective could have spent all his sleeping and working hours
in pursuit of those shadows. And he
did
spend too many of them that way,
until his eyes burned and the ache in his feet and legs rose above background noise
to become the primary concern of his conscious mind. His back hurt. His neck
hurt. He didn't know who to trust, and when he did sleep, he dreamed of
dragons.

And today there had been another body.
Just like the last one, mutilated and chewed. A twenty-two-year-old girl with
a baby and a husband and an office job.

It wasn't as simple as talking to Jane
made it seem. His trip to Boston had left him confused, but it felt like the
sort of confusion that led to eventual enlightenment. There were factions in
Faerie. The tendency was to think of the Elves as monolithic, implacable. But
that was the sort of mistake, when dealing with enemy powers, that got one into
messy little wars.

He figured now that he'd stumbled across a
sort of turf war that had spilled over into the iron world. Jewels and
Geoff—and Peese had been right to suspect them, damn him —might be allied with
one faction. The ones he'd seen them with at the Goth club.

The question was, was Matthew part of that
cabal, or another? And what about Peese?

Uncomfortable to admit that Don himself
had become embroiled in yet a fourth conspiracy. He could half convince himself
that it wasn't arrogance, that it was what the dreams demanded, what duty
demanded. And he half didn't care if it was arrogance, anyway. Somebody was
going to have to run interference between cops and Magi. Somebody was going to
have to . . . liaise. The world had already changed.

Magic was a one-way gate.

Don caught himself half asleep at his
desk, rubbing his temples in one hand, and forced himself to his feet. He'd be
no good to anyone if he didn't get some rest.

He took a train toward home, but never
found his bed. He was ascending from the subway when a bright spike of cold
drove through his hand, an icicle plunged between the bones. He clutched it
against his chest, gasping. More pain, enough pain to demote the other aches
and pains to irritations. The night was jewel-bright, the city gleaming tawdry
and brilliant. Something was happening.

Pain brought adrenaline, and adrenaline
brought energy. He charged up the stairs, startling a few late-traveling
commuters, one hand on the steel banister, seeking like a compass needle. He'd
started taking better care of himself since the surgery, and this was the
payoff, now; he was barely panting when he hit the street. If he lived, maybe
he'd run the Marathon one of these years. Crazier things happened.

The cold was as fierce as that which had
charged his ring on the night of the second murder. He'd gone two more steps
before his cell phone rang. He growled, stepping into the corner of the subway entrance,
out of the pedestrian flow. "Smith."

Don. It's Jane." She paused to take a
breath, to cement her thoughts, and he cut her off. I m after something
Fae," he said. "Something big, moving in the city. Gotta go, call you
ba—" It'll wait." Her voice froze his thumb halfway to the red
button. Come and see me. Now, tonight. Take a cab."

He opened his mouth to argue, and closed
it with a snap. "See you in fifteen minutes," Jane said.

You ever seen a black man try to hail a
cab in this town?" He closed the phone one-handed before she could snap
something dire in return and turned around to trudge back down the stairs to
the subway, his ring jabbing pins and needles from his hand all the way up to
his shoulder before subsiding to dull discomfort. The train
would
be
faster than hailing a cab, whatever Jane thought. And a hell of a lot less
frustrating.

As Don jogged through crowds on a subway
platform, four of the sources of his pain and that maddening chill stepped
through the reflection of a dark shopwindow, and stood dusting themselves and glancing
this way and that on the empty street.

"In Halloween costumes, no
less," Matthew said, rolling his eyes. At least Marlowe had ditched his
wings in Hell — and followed Matthew's advice about where they should come out.
Matthew wanted to be close to his home base, but not
in
it, in case
anyone had left him any surprises. "My apartment's up the block. We'll
find something to change into there."

Lily looked doubtfully at Matthew and at
herself. "I'm fine like this," she said, as Marlowe folded his arms
and Geoff said nothing at all.

"Is it wise to return to your
lodgings?" Marlowe asked.

"We're ready for them if they try
anything," Matthew said. "And I don't intend to discuss plans there.

That
can wait for a safer space. I wouldn't put it past
Jane to bug my apartment."

Kit glanced side-ways at him, and Matthew
gestured the poet to walk alongside. He did, with Lily and Geoff completing the
square. Lily was looking up, head craned back, until Geoff touched her arm. "You'll
look like a tourist," he said.

"I am a tourist," she answered,
but after that she kept her eyes to the front as she walked. There were still a
few people on the street though the wind was blowing cold. A dark-haired young
woman in bright sunflower barrettes brushed by Matthew, undressing him with a
look that he profoundly ignored, though he wouldn't have if he'd felt the fey
iciness that a very particular, very exhausting sort of spell cloaked from both
him and Kit. Kit, panhandled, dropped a shilling in a cup.

Lily hugged herself as gooseflesh crawled
across her skin. Her corset left her shoulders bare, and offered no protection
from the wind —and kept her from hunching into herself for warmth. Geoff
slipped his jacket off and swung it over her shoulders without asking. Matthew
and Kit, in the lead, had not noticed.

Fortunately, Matthew's directions had
ensured it was not far to walk. Matthew unlocked the security door, ushered
everyone into the entryway, and led them single file up the stairs. Meanwhile,
underground, Don was on a train rocking westward; Matthew checked his wards,
found them secure, and unbolted his front door and let himself into his
apartment for the first time in almost a week.

The answering machine flashed with
messages. He was sure his cell phone would as well, if he bothered to look, and
spared a moment wondering if he'd been reported as a missing person yet. Time enough
to deal with that later, although he did place a call to his teaching
assistant, who was mercifully not answering her phone, to say that he'd been
called away on an emergency and hadn't had access to a phone or Internet
connection, and would she please cover his classes until next Wednesday at the
latest.